Microbiome and metagenomics: the link with products for the skin
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The marketing of cosmetic products requires mastery of their regulation, but also a good knowledge of disciplines as varied as biology, physiology, galenic, toxicology, physicochemistry, microbiology… However, a scientific discipline can provide valuable information and thus be added to this list: metagenomics!

Some fundamental knowledge of genetics must be understood today, mainly because of the recent emergence in the beauty sector of the term “metagenomics”. It is therefore necessary at this stage to recall or clarify certain concepts.

Genomics

The genome is the totality of an individual’s genetic information contained in his or her DNA. The latter encodes genes, the building blocks of an organism’s heredity and functioning. Together, they constitute the partition that the cell plays for its functioning. Indeed, genes are decoded to synthesize proteins, structural and operational building blocks of cell function. These contribute to the production of a form, function or any observable characteristic of living organisms that geneticists call a phenotype. Each of our cells contains about 25,000 genes divided into 23 pairs of chromosomes, but not all of them are used in the same way. Indeed, each cell fulfils functions that may be specific to it (a skin cell obviously does not have the same functions as an intestinal cell). Genomics studies the functioning of an organism or organ at the genome level rather than at the scale of a single gene (DNA analysis).

Metagenomics and microbiome

Metagenomics allows several genomes to be analysed simultaneously. It is ...